If you're on Debian Linux and have a user account and you changed the password you might be unpleasantly surprised by a constantly occuring prompt to reinput the keyring stored old password.
You might be wondering how to reset the gnome keyring password to stop that annoying pop-up prompt from bittering your days.
The simplest fix is to delete all stored passwords and reset the keyring stored values. That's in case if you don't have other important passwords saved.

This is done by simply creating a backup of the old keyring just in case if you have something important stored you can do that with:

cd ~/.local/share/keyrings/
cp login.keyring login.keyring.backup

Then delete the keyring store file:

rm -f ~/.local/share/keyrings/login.keyring

Under some GNU / Linux distrubutions such as Linux Mint deleting the keyring file will not work on such an alternative method is to use seahorse (a frontend program to GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard), that is doing key management for GNOME desktop users.

hipo@jericho:~$ seahorse

For older Linux distributions like Ubuntu 12.10 e.g. in GNOME 2, the correct path to keyring file is ~/.gnome2/keyrings/

I just upgraded my notebook fom Debian Stretch 9.5Linux to Buster (current Testing Debian release). All went fine except I got a lot of headaches because it seems in Buster the GNOME Flashback 3.30 which I use has removed the support for Show Desktop Icons in Nautilus because of some migration reasons of Nautilus to a newer version 4, (hopefully that would be temporary) from gnome-tweak-tool whose package now contains no binary for gnome-tweak-tool, instead an equivalent tool now is called gnome-tweaks and this tool is no longer working under Gnome Flashback but only with GNOME Classic 3.30 and the regular GNOME 3.30 launcher available from gdm3 (the Gnome Display manager).

1. Displaying Missing Desktop icons on GNOME version 3.30

The way to display Desktop icons in GNOME 3.28 onwards at the moment of writting this post and the whole issue with the removed handling of Desktop icons in Nautilus is explained well by Carlos Soriano a gnome shell extension developer in his blog post Desktop icons goes beta.

Now you should use the gnome-tweaks command tool to enable the new added gnome-shell extension.

hipo@linux:~$ gnome-tweaks

Once enabled your Desktop icons will appear as usual as seen in below shot, the downside this solutions is icons as seen in below screenshot is that pictures doesn't have Thumbnail pictures generated … and icons when kept on with mouse over can move only in a selected square like perimeter (when moved left / right / up down side). That "woody" icon movement sucks a bit but much better than no icons at all.

In regular GNOME session gnome-tweaks works fine and with the help of an GNOME Shell Extension addon it is possible to add the Missing Desktop icons however the only working fix for GNOME FlashBack 3.30 is to substitute nautilus (the default GNOME file manager) with NEMO (which is The Official file manager for Cinnamon Desktop Environment).
Thanksfully this is done relatively easy and all I had to do is to use a little "hack", e.g. install nemo.

root@linux:~# apt-get install –yes -qq nemo

And add a new auto-launcher for gnome that launches nemo file manager instead of nautilus.

To add the auto-launcher in GNOME I had to add a file with following content:

For those who don't know GNOME has this handy way to set an autostart programs by using the specific .desktop extension files that have to be placed under $HOME/.config/autostart (where $HOME = the logged in user home directory).

Then I had to restart my GNOME FlashBack session (e.g. Log Out and Login with a new session) and the icons appeared.

The downside of this dirty workaround is that desktop icons even though showing up couldn't be moved (rearranged) freely on any location of desktop (are pretty much static) and the even worser fact about this hack is you can't actually copy paste easily copy files from your Desktop within another desktop folder …
I know that's shitty but at the moment there is no better solution and this is better than nothing at all.

P.S. I tried downgrading my Debian Testing to Stable Stretch Linux again with the idea to use the old GNOME 3.22 that the Stable Debian distro provides but, ended up with a lot of mess after experimenting to downgrade using /etc/apt/preferences file records and substitution in /etc/apt/sources.list to include the stable .deb repository and apt dselect and aptitude package management tools. Officially downgrades are not encouraged and supported by Debian, but I hoped I could relatively easily do it by manually fixing the broken dependencies after removing debian packages manually combined with short for bash loops like I did in the past, but it seems this time I broke the system worse, so I could hardly return it back to normal operation in upgrading packages with a lot of manual hacking with apt-get and few one liner scripts. Thus I abandoned as a fix the possiiblity to downgrade Testing Debian to stable, I even considered switching from GNOMEdesktop environment to something more light as OpenBox / Cinnamon / XFCE and gave them one more try but the results weren't nice, I reconsidered again to go back to using the Good Old GNU Step Window Maker as a GNOME alternative which in my opinion is still a great GUI environment for security crackers / sysadmins /hackers (programmers) and eventually perhaps I will switch back to using it, because GNOME is becoming more and more bloated with the years and I can hardly stand it … I mean I did not expected GNOME to be developed in the shitty Mobile Interface (Unity) way, I have been a loyal user to GNOME for so many years and have lived trhough all its mess over the years, its painful to see how the good and efficient GNOME 2 went the bad broken road of changing completely concepts and interface in GNOME 3.x …

3. Closure

GNOME Desktop icons has been with GNOME users already for about 15+ years so IMHO the missing ability to add them easily through gnome tweak tool or Gnome Control Center is a absurd stupidity and killed at least 5 times out of my time to solve and the solution is far from good … I understand that in future the GNOME developers want to make GNOME as modular as possible through GNOME Shell Extensions however if you're removing such an important functionality that's for ages in most mainstream operating systems such as M$ Windows / Mac OS is an insanity.Through my quick research online I found the Missing Desktop Icons is experienced by other people on other Linux distros besides Debian I saw complains by Ubuntu / Fedora and Arch Linux users in forums and mailing lists.
What puzzles me why the reaction of such a major complained are not seriously considered by GNOME developers, especially after all the problems with transition from GNOME 2 -> GNOME 3 which already pushed a lot of GNOME users to move from GNOME to KDE / MATE (like in Linux Mint whose GUI is based on Linux Mint). Definitely such a general issues would drive further enthusiasts from GNU / Linux and makes a great harm to the Free Software software community.
Hopefully the missing desktop icons hell will be solved in upcoming GNOME releases.

After trying out GNOME 3.2.x enough and giving it enough chance I've decided to finally migrate to Linux Mate graphical environment (the fork of gnome 2 for modern PCs).

I have to say I'm running Debian 9 Stretch on my upgraded Thinkpad R61, after 2 / 3 days upgrade operations from Debian 7 to Debian 8, from Debian 8 to 9.

Just Migrated to Mate all looked fine, but just as I wanted to make the look and feel identical to GNOME 2, I played with Appearance because I wanted to apply theme Adwaita the one, the one so popular since the glorious times when GNOME 2 was a king of the Linux Desktop.

This package provides a number of Themes I could choose from and one of them is Adwaita Not surprisingly, I faced a theme issue
it complains about window manager theme "Adwaita" missing.

Using the example for Adwaitamate-appearance-propertiesgives, I believe this is the "Proper" way to fix it, so do the following in order;

The quick and dirty way when using it

Select Adwaita theme

Click onCustomise

Select theWindow Bordertab

Select window border theme "TraditionalOk" andclose

A Permanent Fix to the Adwaita missing its Theme Manager using terminal / console

I found that all I had to do to resolve the issuepermanentlywas to do this;

vim /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/index.theme

And change at the bottom where it says

MetacityTheme

to say

TraditionalOk

instead ofAdwaita.

I know why this works, I just do not know why Adwaita can't use its own Metacity theme without issues, aside from what the kind people at#gnome@irc.freenode.netsaid about Adwaita previously relying on Mutter.

Feel free to tell me if up explained did not work for you or if you have a better way to deal with the Adwaita missing manager theme issueso far I believe the problem is resolved correctly.

As an ex-Windows user I'm still addicted to Windows User brainwashing as an ex-victim of Windows 95 / 98 and XP:), so I tend to love very much and its still hard for me to forget some major Key Binding (Windows Key Combinations).

On every new Desktop Linux I install, I have the habit to configure few great key combination shortcuts that makes my digital life much easier.
I use usually as a graphical environment GNOME and recently switched toMATE (GNOME 2 fork, cause GNOME 3 is totally messed up and unworthy to me), that's why this article is targetting this two Linux GUI envs, I'll be glad to hear in article comments for any other useful key bindings and how to configure similar key bindings for other Major Linux graphical environments (Cinnamon, KDE Plasma, XFCE, LXDE).

Windows + D – Show Desktop (similar to Windows +M though it doesn't switch to Desktop)

Win – + / – To Maginfy Text and Windows

Shift + Win + Left/Right Arrow – (In Windows if you have multiple monitors connected to the same computer lets say Right Monitor and Left, that combination switches between left monitor and right monitor)

——————————————————————–

The list goes on but I'm not used to all of them, I'll stop here and continue on with how to remake some of my favourite Windows keybindings in Gnu / Linux

Either run it from Menus:

System -> Settings -> Hardware -> Keyboard Shortcuts

Or run command

$ mate-keybinding-properties

After rebinding the Windows:
– Lock Screen and Open New Nautilus Explorer Window (Home folder) variable to be invoked with Windows button, the result
is as that:

Scroll down Mate Keyboard shortcuts and you'll find

also how to configure Windows Button and D Key Combination, following 2 more screenshots showing how to do it note that MOD Key appears once you press Windows Keyboard Key + something (e.g. MATE recognizes MOD Key as Win Key):

3. Most used shortcuts in Gnome and Nautilus

Howdy! I thought that it would be useful to post a practical selection of shortcut keys for GNOME (the Desktop Environment) and Nautilus (the File Manager) and some information about customizing shortcut keys in Ubuntu. I wrote it especially for Ubuntu beginners, but I hope it will prove useful for all.

Ctrl-Alt-Shift – Right/Left arrow : take current window to the next virtual desktop

Ctrl-Alt-D: minimize all windows, and gives focus to the desktop.

Alt-Tab: switch between windows. When you use these shortcut keys, a list of windows that you can select is displayed. Release the keys to select a window.

Ctrl-Alt-Tab: switch the focus between the panels and the desktop. When you use these shortcut keys, a list of items that you can select is displayed. Release the keys to select an item.

Ctrl-Alt-L: lock the screen (tested only in Ubuntu)

Ctrl-L: shortcut for opening locations-by default the path is the home folder*
/ : same as Ctrl-L but has the root (/) as default path* (shortcut found on here)
* both shortcuts can be used while you are on the desktop (no window active)

Ctrl-T : move to trash (in Nautilus)
Quite dangerous key combination because many of us are used to press these keys in order to open a new tab. Because we all delete items using the Delete key, I recommend to deactivate this shortcut key. To do that, go to System » Preferences » Appearance » Interface. Select Editable menu shortcut keys and close the dialog box. Click on the Edit menu in the File Browser. Click the Empty Trash item (it has Ctrl-T as the keyboard shortcut) Press the Delete key to get rid of the shortcut.
You can find all GNOME shortcut keys here

2.2 How to create a custom hotkey to launch whatever application you want in GNOME

As an example, we will set a lock-screen shortcut.

Open "gconf-editor" as the user as you're logged in in GNOME (typing gconf-editor in the terminal or "Run Application").

Go to apps > metacity > keybinding_commands

Here we have a list of twelve slots for commands.

Double click on e.g. "run_command_1"

In Key Value Type in the name of the application or command you want to launch (e.g. gnome-screensaver-command –lock).

How to boost Linux sound volume over 100% to 150% or 200% ?

If you have recently migrated to Free Software Operating System Fedora, Ubuntu or Debian GNU / Linux, OpenSuSE with GNOME / Mate / KDE / Xfce graphical environment, you might encounter that sometimes when using your computer for Multimedia the audio sound produced and streamed to the Sound Card is very low, so low that it prevents you from comprehending what the video, music etc. played says or you have to strain hardly your ears to hear what is to be said.

Let me illustrate what I mean, say you watch an educational video within Firefox / Opera (browser) in Youtube or listen some songs playlist in Vimeo.COM and the Sound on the follow up video suddenly becomes so low that you can't understand what the Coach or Instructor on the video is saying, or it could be a low sound within a Video downloaded on the PC and watched with Mplayer or VLC (Movie Players),
or lets say you listen MP3 / MP4 / OGG Song, S3M with mpg123 (in console) or with Qmmp (a graphical mp3 Windows WinAmp like player for Linux similar to good old XMMS Player).

So what is to be done to increase the audio volume from your Linux powered Notebook over 100% ??

I assume you already tried everything possible such as using aumix (Console / Terminal based tool) to boost your Sound Output to maximum and you also checked Gnome Alsa Mixerto make sure the Volume status is set to maximum but nothing helped as the sound produced is way lower behind you wish too.

By the using alsamixer command might help sometimes to increase the Linux sound volume a little bit but still you can't boost over 100% with it.

linux-desktop:~# apt-cache show pavucontrol|grep -i description -A 3Description-en: PulseAudio Volume Control
PulseAudio Volume Control (pavucontrol) is a simple GTK+ based volume
control tool (mixer) for the PulseAudio sound server. In contrast to
classic mixer tools this one allows you to control both the volume of
—
Description-md5: c43956d9d08801fbaa1a405d7b6a9e6b
Homepage: http://freedesktop.org/software/pulseaudio/pavucontrol/
Tag: admin::configuring, implemented-in::c++, interface::graphical,
interface::x11, role::program, scope::utility, sound::mixer,
root@jericho:/home/hipo# apt-cache show pavucontrol|grep -i description -A 2
Description-en: PulseAudio Volume Control
PulseAudio Volume Control (pavucontrol) is a simple GTK+ based volume
control tool (mixer) for the PulseAudio sound server. In contrast to
—
Description-md5: c43956d9d08801fbaa1a405d7b6a9e6b
Homepage: http://freedesktop.org/software/pulseaudio/pavucontrol/

To run it run pavucontrol from terminal program:

linux-desktop:~$ pavucontrol

If pavucontrol command is not present on your Linux install it with apt as usual:

linux-desktop:~# apt-get install –yes pavucontrol
…

Note that PavuControl is using PulseAudio Linux Sound Streaming server to boost the Audio and not the ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Server – which receives sounds from various applications and paralyzes them in different sound channels).

If you want to prevent the Volume Boost audio increase over 100% to lets say either the 150% percentages, the maximum pavucontrol gives you can do that by including the /usr/bin/pactl command (which is a part of pulseaudio-utils package) to /etc/rc.local (be sure you include the command in rc.local before exit 0 command)

To give it a test you can manually run from terminal:

linux-desktop:~$ pactl — set-sink-volume 0 150%

You will notice the audio output sound increased immediately Note that the Sound boosting in Linux can be done over 150% to lets say 200% or 250 out of the normal maximum, and you can test 200% if you have a nice big speakers connected to your Computer to piss off your wife :), e.g. run:

# !!!!!!! RUN BELOW COMMAND AT YOUR OWN RISK AS THIS MIGHT DAMAGE YOUR COMPUTER OR EXTERNAL SOUND SPEAKERS !!!!!!

Being a long time GNU / Linux user, I've been quite dissatisfied for the fact that in latest Debian and Ubuntu Linux, the default Key combination to Kill X (CTRL + ALT + BACKSPACE) is no longer working.

Though nowdays Xorg (XServer) is pretty stable it still happens from time to time for some application to overload the PC badly and make Gnome or KDE environment little or no responsive at all and here comes the goody CTRL + ALT + BACKSPACE it is pretty much like (CTRL + ALT + DEL) did restarted the computer in DOS and earlier Windows OS-es once the environment became unusable with the only difference that just Xorg server is restarted and the other using programs that are in background work just like they used to.

CTRL + ALT + Backspace is a great thing to use especially if you're running some homebrew server and you use it both as a Server with some few little websites and as a Desktop environment to browse the net and do basic stuff.

So here comes the question how to make the CTRL + ALT + BACKSPACE keyboard combination be killing Xserver like in the good old days?

The easiest way to do it interactively in ncurses interface is by running:

root@noah:~# dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

If somehow on the machine you don't have dpkg-reconfigure or you prefer to do set CTRL + ALT + BACKSPACE Kill Switch manually edit /etc/default/keyboard

The configuration should be working across Debian 7, 8, 9 as well as Ubuntu 12 ..14 .. 16 and hopefully in future releases too, just as many other Linux distributions like Mint etc. the Xserver Kill Switch setting should be located in same file.

Finally if even after that change the Control Alt BackSpace Kill Switch sequence refuses to work in GNOME Desktop environment, it might be due to a local setting typical for GNOME and this should be fixed via the good known gnome-tweak-tool

So GNOME users should run it from command line and check the setting there, e.g.:

If you're using some GNU / Linux distribution with GNOME 3 and you would like to show output of screen in two connected Monitors to the machine you will stumble upon really unusual behavior. For some unknown reason GNOME environment developers make second monitor to keep fixed on on First Workspace, so whether you try changing Desktops to second / third etc. Virtual Desktop you end up with your secondary monitor focused on Workspace 1. Logically the use of Dual monitor configuration is to show all GUI output identically on both monitors so this behavior is "wrong" ….

Fortunately there is setting that control this weird behavior in GNOME through gconf-editor and simply changing that switches monitors to show properly.

I found it very annoying to have a pop-up notification every time I receive a new email it is just pointless there especially, when I already use Thunderbird (IceDove) to fetch my email via pop3. This pop-up notification though planned to be useful messes with my Desktop and breaks the habit on how I'm used to old GNOME interface…. I remember same popup notification was present on older Fedora releases (back in time when I used Fedora Linux for my Desktop).

My logical guess was in order to disable popup notification in GNOME 3 I had to tamper with gconf-editor. In gconf-editor config database there is:

Apps -> Notification daemon

Problem it is not possible to turn it off. Only available change options are:

default-sound, popup_location, sound_enabled, and theme

After some time of try / fail attempts I found the solution on linuxquestions forum, its quite raw solution but it works, all I had to do is change permissions of /usr/lib/notification-daemon/notification-daemon;

debian:~# chmod 0000 /usr/lib/notification-daemon/notification-daemon Another thing that is handy todisable is POP UP Window with warning that you have low disk space on Hard Drive.

The warinng for Disk space is very annoying and popups up on every GNOME boot. Actually the hard drive with Low disk space is and old mounted partition in NTFS and I only use it to read data.

It is ultra annoying, that in newest Debian and Ubuntu releases with GNOME 3 Desktop environment on every shutdown or restart you need to type in Super User (root) password, to authorize shutdown / restart.

Generally prompting for root password on GNOME restart is obviously a good think from security point of view, but from usability one – especially on notebooks it is useless annoyance…

So after changing this behavior I came up with this tiny article on how to get rid of GNOME Shutdown / Restart password prompt.

There is a click button (on left of Auth prompt on Shutdown showing URL to XML policy rule from where this behavior is controlled. A really good hint to where to look for to change those annoying behavior…

Here is how to change this new annoying behavior to old GNOME 2 default restart with no root password prompt .
linux:~# gedit /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.consolekit.policy

Find in XML source sections:

Restart the system when multiple users are logged inSystem policy prevents restarting the system when other users are logged innoauth_admin_keepStop the system when multiple users are logged inSystem policy prevents stopping the system when other users are logged innoauth_admin_keep

To change Restart and Shutdown GUI behavior to not prompt for password, you need to modify in above code:

<action id="org.freedesktop.consolekit.system.restart-multiple-users">
<description>Restart the system when multiple users are logged in</description>
<message>System policy prevents restarting the system when other users are logged in</message>
<defaults>
<allow_inactive>no</allow_inactive>
<allow_active>yes</allow_active>
</defaults>
</action>

That's all you finally get rid of the annoying prompt for root password. Enjoy 🙂